


rid my heart of mortal fright.

by reddietoattack (villanelles)



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Animal Transformation, Eddie is a werewolf, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Violence, Richie is a moron in love, they’re 18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 20:16:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21398041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanelles/pseuds/reddietoattack
Summary: “Eddie, it’s me. It’s Richie.” There’s no recognition in this creature’s eyes, but Richie watches every muscle in its body tense in a long preternatural wave, preparing to lunge.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 117





	rid my heart of mortal fright.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hettienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hettienne/gifts).

“Eddie! Eddie, where the fuck are you?" Richie bellows, his voice cracking in the thin, cold air as he hurries through the forest. He has no source of light other than the full moon, incredibly low-slung in the sky and as close as he’s ever seen it, and thin branches lash at his face and chest as he runs blindly through the trees. One cuts deeply into his cheek and he stumbles, blood cooling instantly as it hits the air and begins to drip down his jaw in thin ribbons.

Maybe the sound of his voice calls Eddie back to him, or the scent of his blood hot in the air.

A twig snaps just to the right of him, on the other side of a small clearing, the sound as violent as a gunshot in these quiet woods. Richie is panting, fingers clasped uselessly over his bleeding face, as he tries to look everywhere at once for the source.

It’s then that Eddie steps into the clearing not ten feet away from him. Only, it’s not Eddie.

It wears his general shape, the familiar curvature of his face and shoulders slung over it like a shroud, but it’s not _his_ Eddie. He’s twice as tall, for one thing, his limbs unnaturally elongated and rippling with dense musculature. His clothes are gone, likely discarded on the forest floor where he first transformed, and his pale skin is almost entirely covered by a creeping blanket of coarse black fur. His face— the face Richie loves —is twisted and grotesque, a permanent snarl distorting his delicate features, and his warm brown eyes have gone an inky black. 

All Richie can see within them is a primal hunger that makes his blood turn to ice.

“Eddie, it’s me. It’s Richie.” There’s no recognition in this creature’s eyes, but Richie watches every muscle in its body tense in a long preternatural wave, preparing to lunge. He puts his hands up defensively, pleadingly.

“Eddie, please! I know you’re in there, just listen to me! You don’t have to do this—” The thing wearing Eddie’s body growls, a vicious rumbling that turns Richie’s guts to water instantly, and he knows he should run for his fucking life, but he can’t just leave Eddie out here alone, not like this. Not ever.

“I don’t know exactly what’s happening to you, but we can figure it out,” he says, taking a tentative step into the clearing, hands still extended in front of him. Eddie moves forward too, with a speed that shouldn’t be possible, crossing the space between them before Richie can consider that he’s truly fucked until it’s too late. 

Eddie is inches from his outstretched hands, breathing hotly against the one he’d held to his face. The one he realizes now is covered in his blood. He’s trembling uncontrollably as Eddie eyes him with the gaze of a predator, zeroing in on his utter vulnerability and drinking it in like it has a scent of its own, thick in the air between them. His twisted, black nose brushes across Richie’s bloody palm, and in the stark moonlight, Richie can see his inhuman pupils dilate with desire.

Richie has no time to process how quickly Eddie moves; one moment, they’re caught in tense stasis in the center of the clearing, and the next, his spine is colliding painfully with the trunk of an enormous tree, all the air crashing out of his lungs in one excruciating rush as he screams. The sound tears out of him helplessly, shrill and unfamiliar to his own ears, pure fear condensed into one long and reedy cry.

Eddie’s hands, made enormous by his transformation, wrap almost all the way around Richie’s upper arms where he holds him against the tree, a good six inches off the ground. Richie’s feet scrabble at the forest floor for purchase he won’t find as he feels his jacket and shirt rupturing under Eddie’s claws, and then eight enormous needles are piercing into his skin, and Richie _wails_.

“Eddie, please! Please, you’re hurting me, fuck—” Panic has finally set in, and Richie thrashes as uselessly in Eddie’s grip as a mouse cornered by a jaguar. Adrenaline is pumping through him in heady waves, ratcheting his heart rate up and up until he can hardly feel it, a viciously fast thrum not unlike that of a hummingbird. Those glassy, emotionless eyes are inches away from his own, Eddie’s fetid breath thick with the scent of blood and peat fogging up his glasses, and his lips are curling back to reveal lethal looking fangs.

“Eddie,” Richie sobs, realizing as an afterthought that his face is wet with tears. He struggles to lift an arm up within the vice of Eddie’s grip, whimpering as this forces those deadly claws further into his skin, and palms Eddie’s coarse cheek, thumb brushing the gnarled skin beneath his eye. “Eddie, please.”

For a single instant, Richie sees recognition enter his eyes, the endlessly black voids of his pupils going glassy with emotion. All he can do is sob and shake in Eddie’s grip, stroking his face, watching his twisted features soften, just for a second.

“This isn’t you. You’d never hurt me,” he whimpers. He feels flayed open, as small and vulnerable as he’s ever been.

Eddie’s face goes cold, and a violent growl tears out of him, so loud that it passes through Richie’s body like tremors underneath the earth. His body arches toward Richie’s throat, and just then, Richie is struck with the cold finality of the fact that he’s going to die.

“I love you, Eds.”

It leaves him as a sigh, a whisper in the close heat between them. An electric shock seems to travel through the air and through both of their bodies, a tangible jolt through muscle and bone, and all at once, Eddie’s grip disappears and Richie is falling into an ungainly heap on the forest floor with Eddie landing heavily across his legs.

He’s dazed, vision blurry with tears, and it takes a good minute to understand that the thing crawling into his lap and pinning him to the floor isn’t monstrous anymore. It’s Eddie, returned to his diminutive size, endless swaths of pale, bare skin seeming to glow in the moonlight without that coarse black fur covering them. He’s spattered in dirt and Richie’s blood, his face slick with tears as he clambers into Richie’s lap, shaking hands traveling from his temples to his wrists to assess the damage before collapsing into his arms.

“I told you not to call me that, dickhead,” Eddie says, the irritation in his voice eclipsed by the sob that rips out of him, and he presses his wet face into Richie’s neck. “Why didn’t you run, you fucking asshole? I could have seriously hurt you, I could have— I could have _killed_ you—”

“I’d never leave you, Eds.” Richie breathes the words against his temple, wrapping his aching arms around Eddie and spreading his palms against the smooth expanse of his back to bring him close. He can’t tell which one of them is shaking, or if they both are, but he presses his face to Eddie’s hair and breathes deeply. “If anyone is gonna eviscerate me, it might as well be you.”

“God, you’re so fucking stupid,” Eddie sobs, thin fingers clutching Richie’s curls like a lifeline, and he presses his mouth slick with his own blood to Richie’s neck. “I never want to hurt you.”

“You never have, not on purpose. I know you wouldn’t.” He’s rubbing circles against Eddie’s spine with his fingertips, pressing his tear-streaked lips to Eddie’s temple, his jaw, his cheek, as swiftly and softly as the falling leaves settling to the forest floor around them, and then Eddie surges up to meet him and they’re kissing, _finally_.

It tastes sharply of Eddie’s blood, his lips cut by the unfamiliar shape of his fangs, and Richie pulls Eddie’s lower lip into his mouth and swipes his tongue soothingly against it, yearning to press in for more but unwilling to hurt Eddie. It’s Eddie who muffles a keen against his lips and opens up sweetly, desperately for him, kissing him so soundly that Richie feels the ache of it through his entire body.

Richie doesn’t feel the throb of pain in his cheek or arms, or the chill in the forest air, or the disquieting thrum of adrenaline pulsing through his body anymore. He only feels Eddie, warm and soft and human in his arms, their racing hearts pressed closely together, Eddie’s fingers twisting in his curls to angle Richie’s head so he can slip his tongue sweetly into Richie’s mouth. He only feels Eddie, Eddie, _Eddie_.

**Author's Note:**

> This might become a longer fic at some point, but the ineffable Bran suggested on twitter that Eddie is infected with lycanthropy from birth, and despite his mother's attempts to control it, he uncontrollably transforms for the first time in front of Richie, and I just had to slam out this oneshot for it.


End file.
